Weekly News - October 8th

Greetings,

Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule to attend the conferences. It is always such a wonderful opportunity for the students to share their work and talk about their learning goals.

Here are a couple of photos from the week.

Students will participate in the  Global Cardboard Challenge on Monday afternoon.   This is a wonderful event that helps students foster creativity, critical thinking skills, and teamwork as they design, build, and celebrate the wonderful inventions they create out of cardboard. Please send in cardboard with your child tomorrow.

This week starts on a day 4.

What’s happening this week in the classroom?

Reading The focus this week is on being more aware of when a text signals the reader to do more thinking. Students will learn to add their own thinking and consider the author’s purpose when something unexpected happens in the text. We are introducing conditional language such as “could it be that…” or “maybe…” so that students explore several ideas to dig deeper.

Writing  Revision and editing take on a bigger role as students work with more independence on their second narrative. We are working on punctuation within dialogue by referring to our mentor text, Come On, Rain! Students will keep their goals in mind as they write.

Math This week we begin our second math unit, Solving Problems with Units of Measure. In this unit, students will: Investigate, understand, and use place value to manipulate numbers. Build on the understanding of place value to round whole numbers. Continue to develop the understanding of addition and subtraction and use strategies and properties to do so proficiently and fluently. Solve elapsed time, including word problems, by using a number line diagram. Solve word problems involving masses or volumes. We will begin with making conjectures (what we believe to be true) and composing and decomposing numbers.

Social Studies We will continue to look at different types of maps and the information we can glean from them. As we look at different maps of the same area we are trying to make connections of how landforms, climate, and resources all influence the population of different areas. We will also have a guest speaker on Friday sharing his experience as a geographer.